Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Converting FAT32 to NTFS

My new Acer Travelmate C200 came with Windows XP Tablet Edition pre-installed. No problem with that. Until now everything seems fine, except for two small problems. The 100GB hard disk is formatted in FAT32 and it has the Portuguese version of XP installed.

Change the operating system langauge is trivial. I just needed to change the user interface language on the "Languages" tab of the "Regional and Languages Options".

To convert the drive file system from FAT32 to NTFS, I had two options: recreate the partitions and reinstall everything again or convert the file system format. I chose the second. Although I had never tried it before, it seems quite simple. It can be done by an Windows XP built in utility. I only needed to type two simple commands:

% vol c: (to find out the drive's volume name - it will be necessary later)

% convert c: /fat32:ntfs (the system will restart a couple of times)

It worked well with me. After a few minutes I have a NTFS file system in my new Acer.

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